Camila Cabello displayed her enormous gratitude for her life she now has on Instagram yesterday.
“If you would’ve told me then what was gonna happen I wouldn’t have believed it,” said Cabello. She is fresh off of headlining her own, Never Be the Same tour and is now opening with Charli XCX for Taylor Swift’s Reputation Stadium Tour.
They had their first show together this week in Glendale, Arizona. She shared some fun photos from their first evening performing together and let fans look a little into her past that she hasn’t talked about much before.
In the first photo that shows Cabello smiling at Swift on stage she explained what was going through her mind in that moment. “I remembered when i came to school one day (I think I was in 9th grade but could be wrong) and my friend Mariana had just seen Taylor on the Speak Now Tour and told me she touched her hand.”
She continued to explain, ” I was like when am I ever gonna be able to afford to go to a Taylor swift concert and touch her hand during Speak Now.” Camila Cabello had a long road to get to where she is today. At just 21 she is one of the fastest rising pop soloist on the charts but how did she get there?
Cabello was born in Cojimar, Eastern Havana, Cuba. Her dad is Mexican from Mexico City and moved to Cuba. Her mother is Cuban. For most of her younger years, they moved back and forth between Mexico City and Havana. When she was 6 years-old they immigrated to Miami, Florida.
In an interview with PopSugar she recalled what her memories are from moving to a new country with a language she wasn’t completely familiar with, “A bus. The yellow lighting of the gas station against the dark hours of midnight. Fast asleep. Silence. My head slumped over my mom’s shoulder. Her voice timid and hesitant as she stumbled through a sentence in English at the cash register. A Winnie the Pooh journal. These are the things I remember when I think of when my mom and I immigrated to America.”
Her family never had a lot of money. When they left Havana to move to the United States they left, “With a couple hundred dollars, the clothes on our backs, no family in the United States, and no clue of what was going to happen next, that’s exactly what we did,” said Cabello as she described how her family had to start from the ground and build up.
We all know Cabello is a powerhouse of determination and hard work. She must get this resilience form her mother. “My mom was a very good architect in Cuba, but when she came to America none of the degrees she earned in Cuba counted, so to make enough to keep us fed and put me into school she began stacking shoes in Marshalls and going to school at night to take courses in English.”
Flash forward to 2008, Cabello receives her US citizenship. She attends high school at Miami Palmetto High School. Her friend gets back from the Taylor Swift concert and tells Cabello how Taylor actually touched her hand and they freak out together. “If you would’ve told me then what was gonna happen I wouldn’t have believed it.”
She soon left high school in 2013 to try and make her dreams come true. Her next move was to audition for XFactor. She auditions with Aretha Franklin’s Respect but doesn’t get aired because the network didn’t obtain the song rights. She then got eliminated during the bootcamp portion.
Not long after the heartbreak of elimination she gets called to come back with four other ladies. Ally Brooke, Normani, Lauren Jauregui, and Dinah Jane. This may start sounding familiar. They would later be called Fifth Harmony. People began noting how much Cabello stood out from the other voices. These people includes Demi Lovato, a judge during the time she was on XFactor and a Billboard 100 journalist who wrote an article that said it’s, “rather uncommon for someone to stand out in a collective as much as Cabello has over the past years.”
She announced her departure from Fifth Harmony in December of 2016. While her exit is contradictory, her success speaks for itself.
Today, she is humbled by experiences and grateful for all the support she has received during this whirlwind adventure. At the end of her Instagram post she said, “I [have] such an intense gratitude for everything I’m experiencing right now. I love you @taylorswift and @charli_xcx .”
